Centenarian Steve Ellis was barely 16 when he joined the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at Tulane University—months before the U.S. entered World War II.
Before that leap, the Louisiana native’s maritime experience was minimal. “The biggest thing I had ever been on was a canoe,” the 100-year-old veteran told Newsweek. Yet soon, he would serve aboard a vessel more than 300-feet long and 50-feet wide.
Ellis grew up in the small town of Amite, and his journey into military service began when his father signed him up for ROTC just months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the strike that propelled America into global conflict.
In February 1944, the war was no longer distant. Administrators “came to my classroom one morning and announced that our class would be commissioned in three weeks,” Ellis recalled. At just 19, he was commissioned as a gunnery officer and shipped off to the Pacific Theater.
Landing Ship Tanks
As a newly minted member of the Navy, Ellis left Tulane for Camp Bradford in Virginia, where he spent two weeks learning to operate Landing Ship Tanks (LSTs). The hastily constructed base had become a major training hub for LST crews, Ellis estimated some 15,000 men were in training there at the time.
Manufactured during World War II, LSTs, which had flat bottoms, were essential for delivering tanks, troops, and supplies directly onto beaches as they required no docks or merchant ships. Each could haul massive loads of equipment straight to the shoreline. “The value of the LST was that it obviated the necessity of having a seaport,” Ellis explained.
“Everybody had had two weeks’ training in whatever he was supposed to do on the ship,” Ellis remembered. After an initial short training, the men joined crews of about 120 people and worked with them for about two weeks as well.
Ellis was assigned to LST 751. “None of the amphibious ships got names,” he told Newsweek. “I guess they were building them so fast they couldn’t think of enough.”
The vessels were identified only by numbers—a reflection of the breakneck pace at which over 1,000 LSTs were built.
Young Men at War
“I thought I was entirely competent to handle anything,” Ellis said of his teenage self, before adding with laugh: “I probably wasn’t.”
“Looking back on it from an 80-something years’ perspective, I think they were out of their minds to take a 19-year-old kid and put them in charge of the gunnery division on a sea-going vessel in the United States Navy,” he said.
In that role, Ellis commanded 19 anti-aircraft guns, oversaw a crew of men, and operated the fire control system that directed when those guns should be fired.
“The average age of that crew, the captain and everybody, was under 20,” Ellis told Newsweek.
The young crew sailed through the Panama Canal into the Pacific, making stops along the way and anchoring for stretches in New Guinea and later the Philippines. They were in the region ahead of the October 1944 invasion, remaining there until the war’s end.
Life at sea was largely routine. The men read, smoked, watched films, and wrote letters home. “I wrote to my mama and my dad, my brothers sometimes, not very often, and three or four girls,” Ellis said. “Anytime we went into a harbor, the first thing we went after was the mail and the second thing was to find out if any ships had any movie that we hadn’t seen.”
Kamikaze Attacks
In the Pacific Theater, Allied convoys faced the constant threat of kamikaze attacks. “The fact that some guy flying a plane was going to kill himself trying to kill you was scary enough,” Ellis said, recalling that his crew fired at a “lot” of suicide planes, but only took two down.
He recounted one harrowing encounter when a plane charged directly at his ship. “At the last minute he turned aside, and he flew right down the port side of the ship. He was looking at us,” he said.
The pilot then “went out and crashed into a little tanker that was a little bit further out,” Ellis continued. “My guess was that we had already unloaded our cargo and had anchored, and I think he didn’t want to waste himself on a ship that was unloaded. And of course, that tank was full of oil.”
“But he had us if he wanted us, he just didn’t want us,” Ellis remarked.
When asked about how he managed his fear during the time, Ellis said: “I was never scared when we were in combat. I was too busy. So I was scared before, and I was sometimes scared after when I thought what might have happened to us. But when we we’re in combat, no, I was never afraid.”
Returning From War
On May 31, 1946, Ellis returned to the United States, telling Newsweek he came back a “very serious young man.”
“Before the war, in college, I was majoring in class cutting and beer drinking,” he joked. “After the war, I was straight out, going to class, studying, getting good grades, doing all the stuff I was supposed to do.”
He said one of the hardest things about coming back from the war was removing cursing from all his words. He said everybody was “doing it all the time” on the ship.
“I’m the kind of guy who adapts pretty easily to what he’s doing… I was able to adapt being in the war, and I was also able to not be in it anymore.” He recognized that not everyone was like that, especially those who saw more conflict head-on.
After trying out several majors, including journalism, he went on to law school and served in a series of judicial posts.
He now is a volunteer at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, where he has been for around 10 years. “Now I do it because I think I have something to impart,” he said, adding: “I feel kind of an obligation as long as I’m able to do that.”
In addition to volunteering, he plays the violin.
Ellis is one of around 66,000 surviving World War II veterans living in the U.S. Around 16 million Americans served in the war.
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